Broadcast network content or programming is commonly provided in conjunction with associated informational content or assets. These assets include advertisements, associated programming, public-service announcements, ad tags, trailers, weather or emergency notifications and a variety of other content, including paid and unpaid content. In this regard, asset providers (e.g., advertisers) who wish to convey information (e.g., advertisements or “ads”) regarding services and/or products to users of the broadcast network often pay for the right to insert their information into programming of the broadcast network. For instance, advertisers may provide ad content to a network operator such that the ad content may be interleaved with broadcast network programming during one or more programming breaks. The delivery of such paid assets often subsidizes or covers the costs of the programming provided by the broadcast network. This may reduce or eliminate costs borne by the users of the broadcast network programming.
In order to achieve a better return on their investment, asset providers often try to target their assets to a selected audience that is deemed likely to be interested in the goods or services of the asset provider. The case of advertisers on a cable television network is illustrative. For instance, an advertiser or a cable television network may target its ads to certain demographic groups based on, for example, geographic location, gender, age, income etc. Accordingly, once an advertiser has created an ad that is targeted to a desired group of viewers (e.g., targeted group) the advertiser may attempt to procure insertion times in the network programming when the targeted group is expected to be among the audience of the network programming.
More recently, it has been proposed to target assets to individual households. This would allow asset providers to better target audience segments of interest or to tailor messages to different audience segments. However, targeting households is problematic. Again, the case of a cable television network is illustrative. It is often possible to obtain audience classification information for a household based on name or address information. For example, information based on credit card transactions or other financial transactions may be available from third party databases. However, information based on an identified household does not always ensure appropriate targeting of assets. In the case of a family household, for example, a current network user might be a mother, a father, a child, a babysitter, etc. Additionally, where the matching of ads to households is performed in the network, some mechanism is required to target the selected ads to the appropriate households. This is difficult in broadcast networks. Accordingly, household-based targeting, while an improvement over untargeted asset delivery or conventional ratings-based asset targeting in a broadcast network, still entails significant obstacles and/or targeting uncertainty.
Current systems have generally suffered from one or more of the following drawbacks: 1) they focus on who is in the household rather than who is watching now; 2) they may only provide coarse information about a subset of the household; 3) they require user participation, which is undesirable for certain users and may entail error; 4) they do not provide a framework for determining when there are multiple viewers or for accurately defining demographics in multiple viewer scenarios; 5) they are fairly static in their assumptions and do not properly handle changing household compositions and demographics; and/or 6) they employ sub-optimal technologies, require extensive training, require excessive resources or otherwise have limited practical application.